POETS Day! Elizabethan Carpentry
David Letterman used to talk about windchill factor. A former weatherman, he thought it was goofy that a cold temperature was announced and then amended accounting for windchill making it the equivalent of a colder measurement rather than just saying the final, adjusted temperature. He’d call windchill fake but quickly add “Now humidity. That’s real.”
I’m with him. Humidity alone isn’t that bad. I don’t think I’ve ever complained about it in the winter. It needs heat to angry it up, but once you get those droplets riled the air’s venomous.
My phone reports the day’s temperature with a “Feels like” when it’s humid too, but that’s wrong. Completely wrong. Humidity isn’t an aspect of heat and doesn’t express as an increase of it. Saying “It’s 92° but with 70% humidity it feels like 103°,” assumes a flow towards equilibrium that’s not there. It would be more apt to say “It’s 92° but with 70% humidity it feels like 92° and you just dropped a cast iron skillet on your foot.” Humidity’s a separate and more immediate discomfort. In freeze-dried lasagna lore a frog in a pot of water over high heat doesn’t notice the slowly increasing temperature and keeps swimming about until he boils. Boils, not drowns. No one would believe the cautionary tale if he doesn’t go up for air. When you’re surrounded by water, heat is secondary.
In my back yard the humidity is 46%. A pittance for this time of year. I’m sitting under an umbrella sipping iced tea and listening to The Otis Redding Channel on Amazon Music and there’s a half-read mystery by my side casting sidelong “you’re just a passing fancy” glances at my keyboard. This is idyllic. Tomorrow shows an increase; 55%. That’s not horrible.
If tomorrow’s weather where you live opens the doors, go out into the world. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Don’t waste the weekend weather on those last few hours of work. If the weather doesn’t look so good, that’s okay. Bars have AC. But for POETS Day, give a few minutes to reading verse. You’ll be happier for it.
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Elizabethan poetry is primed for mockery.
It’s such an attractive target to those with modern sensibilities because it’s such a contrast to those with modern, as opposed to Modern, sensibilities…
I want to but can’t a start a descriptive sentence with “contemporary poetry” since, as I would have to capitalize the first word, I’d cause confusion between “contemporary,” by which I mean modern, by which I don’t mean “Modern,” and “Contemporary,” by which I mean the movement immediately following “Modern,” by which I don’t mean “modern.” It should be easy to call poetry written and published now current, but I don’t know if there is a Current movement.
Most people don’t pay attention to poetry written and published now (PWAPN). When we think of new poetry we tend to think of Eliot or Ginsberg. Not everybody of course, but I think most people have a mental dividing line between poets pictured in suits and ties or sweaters and skirts in their high school textbooks and those in ruffled collars. The Modern movement of the early and middle Twentieth Century and the Contemporary movement of the middle and late same form our ideas of newer poetry.
Both movements worked towards realizing Wordsworth’s language of the common man. PWAPN is split, with New Formalists/ Expansive Poetry (It’s a fight among poets as to which name fits I’m nowhere near qualified to enter,) reining in last centuries’ excesses but keeping a conversational tone and an avant garde movement that’s not quite a movement going in the other direction and abandoning language as spoken for short declarative fragments, deliberately obtuse. To most now, Elizabethans are fussy.
Last century saw poems written to meter but with meter broken casually to keep the sense of the spoken word. The Elizabethans did the opposite. Poetry was not conversation. Verse reigned. With meter’s primacy, language is bent in its service, words distorted or shaved down and mispronounced.
George Gascoigne (1539-1578) was a prominent and innovative poet of the era. He’s credited with writing the first original (there were translations before) blank verse poem in English. In Certayne Notes of Instruction (1575) he wrote of the age’s practices:
This poeticall licence is a shrewde fellow, and couereth many faults in a verse; it maketh wordes longer, shorter, of mo sillables, of fewer, newer, older, truer, falser; and, to conclude, it turkeneth all things at pleasure, for example, ydone for done, adowne for downe, orecome for ouercome, tane for taken, power for powre, heauen for heaun, thewes for good partes or good qualities, and a numbre of other, whiche were but tedious and needelesse to rehearse, since your owne iudgement and readyng will soone make you espie such aduauntages.
Syllables were stretched, stresses tossed aside, and “shocked” became “shock-ed.”
I can’t say he never took advantage of the practices he admonished, but he delivers a clean and beautiful example of poetry without such “licence.” From “The Lullaby of a Lover”:
First, lullaby, my youthful years,
It is now time to go to bed,
For crooked age and hoary hairs
Have won the haven within my head.
With lullaby then, youth, be still,
With lullaby content thy will,
Since courage quails and comes behind,
Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind.
Notable Elizabethans played with quantitative verse, that is, a meter that counts syllables by length rather than by stress. It was the method used to regulate Classical Greek and Latin poetry and English poets took cues from contemporary (small “c” and to them) Italian and French poets. Timing a syllable in English can be tricky as stress is so pronounced. Consider “Silent.” The first syllable, “Sigh” takes longer to say that the second, “lent,” if ever so slightly. “Music” as well. So, “Silent music” would be two quantitative feet: long-short long-short. There were other rules in play: dipthongs and vowels preceding double consonants were considered long but not always.
It wasn’t just timing the syllable that was tricky. In English, stress tends to fall on long syllables anyway, rendering quantitative verse redundant and as such, more or less abandoned.
There were great works. Thomas Campion (1567-1620) defended quantitative verse in Observations in the Art of English Poesy and his “Rose-Cheeked Laura” is held up as a sterling example of the form, though I confess that I can’t tell long from stressed.
Rose-cheeked Laura, come,
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty’s
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.Lovely forms do flow
From concent divinely framed;
Heav’n is music, and thy beauty’s
Birth is heavenly.These dull notes we sing
Discords need for helps to grace them;
Only beauty purely loving
Knows no discord,But still moves delight,
Like clear springs renewed by flowering,
Ever perfect, ever in them-
Selves eternal
Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) played with quantitative verse too, but wrote primarily in iambic pentameter, “the line he did so much to consolidate for English poetry ever after” according to Jeff Dolvin in his essay “Spenser’s Metrics.” Spenser shoehorned a few words in his career.
Dolvin highlights two instances that amused me.
The first, again from “Spenser’s Metric,” is Spenser’s use of “quicksand” in The Faerie Queene. To match meter he requires the word to be pronounced with stress on the second syllable for the unnatural “quick-SAND” only later to use it in a way that requires the usual “QUICK-sand.” In Modern or Contemporary poetry we see breaks of meter and gloss over them. The poet chooses between content and form, and a small crisis doesn’t mar the whole. An Elizabethan would see it differently. Form would take precedent. The ear, and so pronounciation, would follow the meter.
The second involves one of Spenser’s letters to Gabriel Harvey discussing, per Dolvin, “the violence [Spenser] was prepared to do to the word carpenter.” Spenser wanted to extend the middle syllable. Dolvin wrote:
Gabriel Harvey would have none of it: ‘you shal neuer have my sub[1]scription of consent…to make your Carpēnter, our carpĕnter, an inche longer or bigger than God and his Englishe people haue made him’.
I’m a fan of Elizabethan poetry. Poetry was separate from song, but that was new. Ballads, madrigals, and airs were popular and the poetry of the age lent itself more to music than ours does. That form dictates pronunciation seems odd. “quick-SAND?” But we do such now.
“I will always love you,” is a simple six syllables. In poetry, we may stress the odd syllables naturally or the evens emphatically, but it’s six syllable and though “I’ll” wouldn’t bother us, we’d look askance at “I w’always.” We don’t play with syllable counts in poetry that much so it seems odd, but when Whitney Huston belts out twelve syllables of “AYE-ah-AYE-ah-Aye will AL-ways LOVE YOU-oo-OO” we don’t think twice because it’s setting words to music. In Hamilton the first two times “I will never be satisfied” is sung it’s at the syllable count as spoken. The third time it’s “I will never be satisfie-eed.”
The Elizabethan conception of poetry was tied to music more closely than ours is so in it words bent to song. That may not change your view of Spenser, Campion, et al., but it might inform your appreciation.
Finally, speaking of the et al., there is always debate about who was the voice of whatever period or generation. Ralegh has a claim on the Elizabethan Age, as does Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and I’m sure a few others. All good, but…
The Doubt of Future Foes
Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy,
And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy.
For falsehood now doth flow, and subject faith doth ebb,
Which would not be, if reason ruled or wisdom weaved the web.
But clouds of toys untried do cloak aspiring minds,
Which turn to rain of late repent, by course of changed winds.
The top of hope supposed, the root of truth will be,
And fruitless all their grafféd guiles, as shortly ye shall see.
The dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds,
Shall be unsealed by worthy wights whose foresight falsehood finds.
The daughter of debate, that eke discord doth sow
Shall reap no gain where former rule hath taught still peace to grow.
No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port,
Our realm it brooks no stranger’s force, let them elsewhere resort.
Our rusty sword with rest, shall first his edge employ
To poll their tops that seek such change and gape for joy.
Shouldn’t it be “exiles our present joy”?
